Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping

By Rachel Bowlby

Book Overview

Asserting that a history of shopping was, until recently, a history of women, Rachel Bowlby trains her eye on the evolution of the modern shopper. She uses a compelling blend of history, literary analysis, and cultural criticism to explore the rise of department stores and supermarkets of the United States, France, and Great Britain. Bowlby recalls the fascinating early days of these institutions. In the mid-nineteenth century, when department stores first developed, their fabulous new buildings brought middle-class women into town, where they could indulge in what was then a new activity: a day's shopping. The stores offered luxury, flattering women into believing that they belonged in a beautiful environment. It is here, Bowlby argues, that the idea of the modern woman's passion for fashion and shopping took hold. Developed in the twentieth century, supermarkets took an opposite tack: they offered functionality, standardization, and cheapness. However, Bowlby claims, despite their differences, the two institutions belong together as emblematic of their respective eras' social developments: the department store with the growth of cities, the supermarket with the proliferation of suburbs. With their dazzling lights and displays, both supermarkets and department stores were thought to produce in females an enhanced or trance-like state of mind. For readers who regard shopping as a spectator or participatory sport, and for those who wish to understand our culture and the psychology of women, or those who simply enjoy a witty, literate romp through the aisles, Carried Away is the perfect purchase.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231122748
• ISBN13: 9780231122740
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.8"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

What Do Shoppers Want?

The best thing about "Carried Away," is the research Bowlby has done on marketers' changing models of shoppers' consciousness. She deftly shows that these models are empty of any true psychological insight, but instead entirely bound up with the culture and the time and the economic circumstances in which the models were devised. The worst thing is that she spends too much time researching British marketing publications from the 50s and 60s. The US has always been the hot molten center of marketing and retail trends -- a fact which Bowlby readily acknowledges throughout most of the book -- thus the inclusion textual readings from old British marketing journals seems to have everything to do with Bowlby being a professor in England and her original publisher being British, and nothing to do with whether this information is really appropriate. But this is a relatively minor annyonance in what is really quite a witty, interesting look at the rise of the supermarket and the concomitant creation of new packaging, new advertising, new models of the shopper consciousness. Bowlby is at her best here, giving us an historical perspective of shoppers (mostly women in the early days of supermarket shopping) who,depending on the theorist, are believed to be extremely suggestible given certain conditions, or extremely rational no matter what the conditions. For instance, in the 50s, that era of mass outputs and mass consumption and McCarthyism, some social critics like Vance Parkard posited that advertisers were "hidden persuaders" using sophisticated brainwashing techniques to sell weak-minded women things they did not really need. But in the 60s and 70s, the model of shopper consciousness shifted. Suddenly, the shopper -- still nearly always seen as a woman -- was in charge, "with it," "sophisticated." The rise of the "power brand" in the 80s -- a time during which the appeals of certain brands were apparently so overwhelming that even the sophisticated 70s shopper succumbed -- swung the pendulum back to the weak-minded model. Bowlby neatly lampoons the variations these psycological models have gone through since the rise of the supermarket, but notes that ultimately, this bipolar model is still intact. I particularly recommend "Carried Away" to marketers, especially young marketers who have never seen the vacillation in the models of shopper consciousness. Take it to the next marketer's conference you attend. It's the perfect antidote to those enlessly dull days spent listening to hour after hour of case studies in which consumers are uniformly described as "sophisticated," or "savvy." Bowlby's light touch and eye for the absurd will help you keep all the tepid, instrumetally tainted "shopper psychology" in perspective.